PIERRE — For 80 years, the family of Robert Bartlett has been left to wonder what happened to him after he was presumed killed during battle in occupied France.
But the mystery surrounding what happened to Bartlett’s remains finally came to a close on May 20 after he was accounted for and sent on his final journey home to South Dakota. The Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA) announced in mid-July that Bartlett’s remains had been identified through the use of modern technology, dropping the former X-141 nomenclature given to the remains when they were initially discovered months after the battle that killed him.
It marks the end of a decades-long mystery for his family — all but one, a brother, had never met Robert.
“It’s awesome, he is coming home for a final rest,” Janet Bartlett, Robert’s niece, told DRG News. “Everyone I talk to is just in awe.”
The remains of Corp. Robert Bartlett will lie in state in Blunt, S.D., near his hometown. In July 1944, Bartlett was assigned to Company A, 744th Tank Battalion, as a crew member of an M5A1 Stuart light tank. His unit was engaged in battle with Nazi German forces at Saint- Germain-d’Elle, France, on July 26 when his tank was struck by an enemy shoulder-fired rocket.
Two crewmembers escaped the vehicle, but Bartlett and another soldier were never seen or heard from again. Due to strong enemy artillery fire and intense combat, surviving crewmembers were unable to examine the tank afterward. Bartlett was declared missing in action, but the Germans never reported him as a prisoner of war. In September 1950, with no evidence that Bartlett survived the fighting, the Army Quartermaster Corps determined his remains were non-recoverable.
Beginning in 1946, the American Graves Registration Command (AGRC) was tasked with investigating and recovering missing American personnel in Europe. On July 30, 1944, AGRC personnel recovered two sets of remains from an M5A1 destroyed near Saint-Germain-d’Elle. They could not identify the remains, and they were designated as X-141 and X-142 St. Laurent and interred in the Normandy American Cemetery in France.
While studying unresolved American losses in the Saint-Germain-d’Elle area, a DPAA historian determined that the M5A1 Stuart tank recovered from the area belonged to Company A, where Bartlett was assigned. This correlation led DPAA and American Battle Monuments Commission personnel to exhume the remains of X-141 and X-142 in April 2018 and send them to the DPAA
laboratory for analysis and identification.
Officially created in 2015 after mergers within the Department of Defense, DPAA is an agency tasked with recovering and identifying prisoners of war and soldiers, sailors and airmen who are missing in action (POW/MIA) from past conflicts around the world.
In Corp. Bartlett’s case, the federal agency relied largely on dental and anthropological analysis to get a positive ID.
“Scientists from the Armed Forces Medical Examiner System also used mitochondrial DNA and Y chromosome DNA analysis,” a press release from the agency explains. “DPAA is grateful to Mr. Ty Reid for his research support, and to the American Battle Monuments Commission and to the U.S. Army Regional Mortuary-Europe/Africa for their partnership in this mission.”
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On July 31, Bartlett was finally returned to Pierre and to Isburg Funeral home, tasked with handling his final arrangements. The Pierre-Fort Pierre Exchange Club posted flags across the Missouri River bridge between Pierre and Fort Pierre Wednesday as a way to welcome the soldier home. He will lie in state until his funeral in Blunt on Aug. 10, which is just north of his hometown of De Grey.
“It is very emotional, even 80 years later,” said Jessica West, funeral director for Isburg Funeral Chapels. “The community of Blunt, they are all pitching in. They are painting the church, getting the cemetery ready, the school gym… The community of Blunt is ready to receive him and bring him home.”
Bartlett is the latest World War II veteran to be repatriated. In 2016, the community of Miller welcomed home 1st Lt. Ben B. Barnes, a fighter pilot who was shot down Dec. 5, 1944 while escorting bombers over Germany. His plane crashed in what would later be East Germany after the Soviet Union took over the area at the end of World War II.
Also in 2016, Brookings native 1st Lt. Donald Beals was buried at Arlington National Cemetery. Beals had been a fighter pilot was was also shot down over Germany.
In 2018, Beals was joined at Arlington when the remains of Flandreau native Lt. William Q. Punnell were interned there. Punnell, also a fighter pilot, was brought down by anti-aircraft fire on July 25, 1944 during a strafing mission against a Japanese airbase in the Palau Islands in the South Pacific.
